Farmer Reaps 23-Pound Sweet Potato!

By Monique Washington

Agricultural officials were flabbergasted when backyard farmer Kenneth Dore walked into the department with a sweet potato weighing 23.5 pounds.

Dore took the humongous vegetable in to the Department of Agriculture in Nevis on Thursday (April 19) after he had pulled it from a communal plot at his job.

Dore said that he had been farming for six years and that he dug up the potato at the New Castle Fire Station where he works and farms with other employees.

“I went out to reap some potatoes and when I was pulling the vine I notice a large area of earth was moving. So I called a co-worker and told him to bring my camera because I think we have something big under here. We used our hands to clean around the area and pulled out the potato,” he said.

Dore said that this is the biggest potato he has ever reaped; he previously reaped a potato that weighed 8lbs he said.

Eric Evelyn, Communications Officer for the Department of Agriculture, also had a first-hand encounter with the massive potato and said that was the biggest he has ever seen in Nevis. Evelyn said that because of the virgin land in that area, crops cultivated there would be of good quality. He added that Nevis land was extremely fertile.

“Anything is possible,” he said. “You can get very good produce from Nevis and this shows the land in Nevis is productive.”

Evelyn posited that people need to plant more so that they can cut the cost of buying produce. Sweet potato, he explained, was an easy crop to grow.

“Sweet potato has always been a crop produced in Nevis. It is very easy to plant and with the cost of the crop on the rise we are seeing more people planting it.”

Evelyn said his Department is seeing a general decline in sweet potato production but last year saw an improvement.

“The interest level is back up again,” said the official.

He revealed that for the past eight years the sweet potatoes have been coming from St. Kitts.  He said the reason for having to import the vegetable could have been due to an infestation of the sweet potato weevil.

“The Department of Agriculture, CARDI and the Taiwanese Technical Mission have been working in collaboration to get rid of the sweet potato weevil,” he said.

Dore told The Observer that he would not sell his enormous potato but will “cut it up and cook it” over a period of time.